This marks the first build of the game that is available to press to preview. How nerve-wracking! There's still a lot we need to finish up in the next two weeks prior to Early Access when it comes to polish and bugfixing, but we have to actually let people see the game at SOME point. I'm really pleased with how this particular build is feeling, though. There are still known issues, but the fundamentals are really strong.

One of the cool new things in this build is the addition of quick starts, which folks have been asking for forever. It basically provides a really handy way to get into the game without having to ever touch the lobby and all its complexity. Which is doubly good right now, because the lobby is still a mess of temporary UI. The quick starts will be hugely useful long after the lobby is polished, though, because they allow for easy choices of cool scenarios.

If you want to create a quick start option of your own (please feel free!), you can simply go through the following process:

Create a game with the settings you want.

Save it.

Write up a little description about it, and put a name for it.

Send it to us on the forums or mantis.

It's very straightforward!

There are also a number of changes in this build to make things prettier and to fix a fair list of bugs. More to come soon!

Oh right... we also have a new trailer! Huge thanks to Pepisolo for going all-out on this one. He really put in a ton of time, and it shows:

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do.

Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.

Enjoy!

Chris

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On the title screen, the glowing nebula in the background makes my eyes hurt. This may be a function of my monitor because when I first received it nearly everything made my eyes hurt, but I've tweaked the settings a lot since then and normally everything is fine now, but that nebula still blows my eyes out.

Also, the quick start box appears to go off the right side of the screen. I'd mantis it but I'm not sure if that's intentional or not.

Restart steam and it should do a little update and then not have it going off the sidebar anymore.

In terms of the background being bright... it is bright, but not it's less bright than just a white word document, you know? I'm not really sure what to say about that, I'd have to redo the entire scene to darken it any. I can't imagine that word processing works for you very well if the amount of light coming out is that harsh, though, in seriousness. The brightest any program can tell your monitor to output is a white pixel, and these are all various shades that are 0.6x to 1x that, mostly in the 0.8x range. Usually what burns the eyes is a huge amount of contrast, but there's not an overt amount of dark area on here, either.

Not trying to be dismissive of it, but there's a limit to what I can do without making everything very dim all the time.

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Restart steam and it should do a little update and then not have it going off the sidebar anymore.

In terms of the background being bright... it is bright, but not it's less bright than just a white word document, you know? I'm not really sure what to say about that, I'd have to redo the entire scene to darken it any. I can't imagine that word processing works for you very well if the amount of light coming out is that harsh, though, in seriousness. The brightest any program can tell your monitor to output is a white pixel, and these are all various shades that are 0.6x to 1x that, mostly in the 0.8x range. Usually what burns the eyes is a huge amount of contrast, but there's not an overt amount of dark area on here, either.

Not trying to be dismissive of it, but there's a limit to what I can do without making everything very dim all the time.

Which is why I brought up my particular monitor situation. It may be just me. Word processing is just fine (it wasn't before I tweaked things a bunch, but it is now). Perhaps its the contrast between the dark and the light that's getting me. Anywhoo.

Sizzle -- Erik and his team at Indie Bros (company he and Josh co-founded after I unfortunately couldn't keep them at Arcen directly anymore) have been hitting up a long list of influencers. I believe the total number is close to 5000 contacts. Fewer than a tenth of those are likely to actually play the game, but various ones will pass on the news.

I'm definitely not opposed to a place that consolidates coverage (good and bad), but I try to avoid it since it stresses me out. Any criticisms that are actionable on our part (that we can and should fix), other folks bubble up to me and we add them to the queue at the appropriate priority.

I know that's a half answer at best, but we're kind of stretched thin. For notable coverage in particular, I'm sure we'll make a link list.

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